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said the voice. “Oh, the love on her face when she looked at that poor deaf-dumb child.”
    “Tell me the fire story. The name story. Please.”
    She is sitting with Mamo on the back stoop outside the laundry. Beyond the stoop is a small bit of yard and after that, the paddock. To the right are the drive sheds. Above and behind is the porthole window, upstairs.
    Mamo likes the name story, too. The story of Grania’s birth and how she came to be named, the day of the town fire, the Great Fire, 1896, Monday the twenty-fifth of May, the end of the holiday weekend that celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday.
    Mamo doesn’t know how much Grania remembers from before the scarlet fever or how much she has read from lips with repeated tellings. When the scarlet fever took away the child’s hearing, whole chunks of language disappeared. On the other hand, small but surprising remnants have stayed. Her ability to memorize is extraordinary, but her memory of the spoken past is unpredictable in the patterns and combinations it releases. Part of what she retains seems to be by chance. It’s as if some words have been stowed with care, while others have been wiped away. All this time has gone by and she has not started school. But now that she is working at the Sunday book, a page every day, she is recognizing single words. She is, in fact, beginning to read.
    “The story, Mamo.”
    “I’m dreaming—daydreaming. Do you remember what that is?”
    Grania reads Mamo’s lips and nods. It means surprise words stuck together, like day and dream. Like apple and eye , which she finds very funny. “You’re the apple of my eye,” Bompa Jack, her grandfather, tells her every time he visits from the farm on the Ninth Concession. He has also taught her “hold your horses” and “kick the bucket,” which is more hilarious than apple and eye.
    “When we first came to Deseronto in 1880,” Mamo says, starting the story, forming the words with care, “it was still called Mill Point. A year after that, its name became Deseronto. A long time before we arrived, almost a hundred years before, Chief John Deserontyon and his Mohawk men paddled here in fifteen canoes. They left their homes along the Mohawk River in New York and made the long journey because they had been promised land by the British king. The Mohawks were rewarded because they were loyal to King George the Third during the American war that was called the War of Independence. Later, the Mohawk chief’s grandson requested extra land near the point, not so far from here, and the village began. After that, the village became a town, and because Chief Deserontyon had been a great warrior, the town was named after him.”
    Mamo does not know how much Grania understands, but she continues. Grania is silent, her eyes watching for the parts of the story she knows.
    “I was told by a man after I left the ship from Ireland that when my sons were older, there would be work for them in this place. I met the man on the road to Mystic and he told us about Mill Point. He said it was already on its way to being an important company town—a Rathbun town. The Rathbun men were from New York, and they were powerful and wealthy and they were clever. They knew that a good town needed good workers. When it was time for us to move, I brought my children here. I did not want to go to aplace where there were tramps and burglars and clothesline thieves.
    “They built a railway here, the Rathbuns. And a roundhouse. And a railway-car factory, and mills and the steamboat dock, and they brought coal all the way from the Pennsylvania mines, across Lake Ontario, from Oswego in New York. The coal arrived on barges and ships that took lumber back to New York.
    “Many people moved to the town—more than five thousand. The Rathbuns brought electricity to the town, and they had the first two telephones. That was the same year we moved here, in 1880. Imagine!” She pauses to consider shouts into boxes nailed